Field of the Invention
Embodiments relate to methods for optimal utilization of an application-controlled queue that is provided in a telecommunication system, a corresponding computer program product with a machine-readable data carrier defined as its storage medium, and finally a telecommunication system.
Background of the Related Art
For call center telecommunication systems, importing UCD announcements (where UCD stands for “Universal Call Distribution,” representing a call distribution unit) for queued calls in two versions with CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) applications is known. Examples of telecommunication systems used for this are HiPath 3000 and OpenScape Office. The two versions are:
a) CSTA Service Play Message and
b) CSTA Service Deflect Call,
where CSTA stands for Computer-Supported Telecommunications Applications, one of the ECMA-standardized protocol specifications, which is used for data traffic between a telephone system and computer programs.
Version a) offers the advantage that multiple callers can hear a certain announcement in one direction at the same time (i.e., bundled). This often involves connecting with standard announcement ports. However, it is not possible in this case for the queued call or the person placing the call to influence the further processing of the call.
In version b), only one call at a time can be connected to an announcement. However, this has the advantage of being able to connect the caller bi-directionally, in order to introduce appropriate control commands for influencing further processing of the queued call, such as transferring it to an agent or to a certain component of the owner or operator of the call center receiving the call. These types of control commands can be introduced, for example, using DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency or Double-Tone Multi-Frequency), which is a multi-frequency selection process. In addition to standard announcement ports, in this case it is also possible to use announcement memories, such as media servers in particular, which are typically connected via SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) or via SIP-Q (a version of SIP) in the case of the aforementioned OpenScape Office and HiPath 3000. However, connection through other protocols, such as HTTP, is also possible.
While calls in version (a) wait in the queue, also called the system queue, calls in version (b) leave the queue automatically at the time when the call is answered by the announcement device using SIP/SIP-Q. This causes the affected call to lose its current queue properties, in particular its position in the queue and elapsed wait time. In addition, after the related announcement, it is not guaranteed that the call to which the announcement was connected will be returned to the queue or to the system queue, if in the meantime the so-called queue limit, i.e., the maximum number of places in the queue, was reached or exceeded. For a caller this would mean that the connection to the call center will be terminated at this point if he cannot be transferred to an agent immediately, because he can no longer be given a place in the queue. To circumvent this problem, until now a portion of the queue has been reserved for resequencing calls that need to return to the queue after the end of an appropriate two-way announcement. The queue limit up to which newly arrived calls are placed in the queue is normally reduced for this purpose, so that the remaining capacity of the queue can be used for “returning” or switched back calls. A working value for this queue limit is about ⅔ of the actual queue size. Disadvantages of this arrangement are, first, that the entire queue cannot be used and, second, that queue usage in the system does not correspond to queue usage in the application. Instead, queue usage in the application is the queue usage in the system plus any connected announcements. This results in the additional disadvantage that queue usage is represented differently for agents, callers, and supervisors.